At a time when every penny counts in business and every decision needs to be strategic and well informed, Human Resources (HR) has never before had access to more analytics. No more excuses or inferiority complexes, HR! Armed with game-changing analytics and tools, you can now take your rightful place at the executive table. You are no longer just an administrative function.

We all know them: Wordfeud, Boggle and the other word games. They involve working with letters, combining them into words and winning by earning points for making the most of the letters. What can you find in the puzzle here?

Believe it or not, Information management is not much different from these kinds of games—at least as it is still used in a large number of organizations.

You can see and hear it all around and in almost every company: When the market situation is struggling during economic crises, such as the one we’re in at the moment, managers and executives require and demand more figures and measures. Details become highly important, and lower-level managers as well as IT departments and information managers find themselves processing one ad-hoc request after another. In HR, these kinds of requests are not uncommon.

HR systems are the “pot of gold” in terms of data for a lot of organisations, especially companies that run people business.

From my experience with customers around HR reporting and analytics in the last few years, the phrase “we want the reports that we always had” seems common. This is unlike the case with finance departments or supply chains and sales, whose reports change every time. New information raises new questions that in turn require new information — it is a never-ending circle of quality improvement.